For a final trip before school started up again, we visited Monticello, the vaunted home of Mr. Thomas Jefferson (we also visited Williamsburg; the colonial playground portion of the city a sad ghost town in this, the plague year, but I did enjoy the chance to see a monologue performed as the enslaved preacher and reformer, Gowan Pamphlet, who I recognized only because of Peter Adamson’s Africana Philosophy podcasts).
I wanted my daughter to see it and to, in time, have memories to call upon later when she tries to process what our country is.
Asked what she took away from investigating the inside of the house, she said that every room had stuff for writing. She also remembered that he had a device for copying what he wrote.
Posing before going to listen to a Jefferson impersonator speak. I made several notes about how the re-enactor subtly, but not too subtly, criticized President Trump. ‘Jefferson’ called out the British for sending armed troops into American cities. He criticized judges who answer to the king, instead of justice, He criticized the king for ignoring petitions. Finally, he said that the pursuit of science is in the Constitution as one of the duties of Congress and that he would always follow science, wherever it leads.
Books and letters. I can look at old writings for hours, though she is not there yet.
Posing with a young looking Jefferson.
Most likely, Thoughts on Political Economy is the treatise by Daniel Raymond, believed to be the first systematic treatise on economic written in America.
Because the struggle to balance disgust and admiration still exists for me when I contemplate Jefferson, this is important to include: the Monument for Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia, which he founded and whose original buildings he designed. I think what I am struggling with is my admiration for Jefferson as a figure of Enlightenment (though I have recently read a book that posit in one as a post-Enlightenment proto-Romantic and another as more like a Renaissance polymath than a true Enlightenment thinker), and I say figure, because the idea of the thinker, reader, writer on the mountain is so alluring, and my inability to forgive him.